White House releases text of Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal

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Banned

The much-anticipated release of the final text of a sweeping Asia-Pacific trade agreement became a reality on Thursday morning, kicking off what is expected to amount to months of intensive debate on Capitol Hill.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s office dropped the details of the massive 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal — 30 chapters and more than 2,000 pages — exactly one month after the agreement was completed on Oct. 5 in Atlanta.

The text of the TPP deal will be under the microscope of Congress and the broader public for at least 90 days before President Obama can sign the agreement, between the United States and 11 other nations: Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore.
The text, which has been going through a legal scrub since the deal was completed, can be found here.

During years of talks, the Obama administration has been roundly criticized by anti-trade groups and labor unions for what they deemed an overarching policy of secrecy while the negotiators finely tuned the agreement’s details, which will guide trade among nations encompassing 40 percent of the global economy.

The release of the text will probably be followed by an “intent to sign” message to Congress from President Obama, meaning there will be 90 days before he can sign the deal, a rule that is part of the trade promotion authority (TPA), or “fast-track,” legislation signed into law this summer.

After that, the White House will send implementing language to Capitol Hill, starting the clock for the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees to begin their process of moving the TPP through their panels and to their respective floors for a final up-and-down vote.

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Well-Known Member

This administration's non-transparency along with a do nothing Congress can only be tolerated so long. I smell revolution, especially since this agreement is shaping up to lower the USA to where Barry wants us to be. Average at best. We can no longer be the best, that isn't fair.

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Banned

U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has wasted no time in sounding the alarm over the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which the Obama administration unveiled to the public and Congress on Thursday.

The enormous agreement (over 5,500 pages), which had been negotiated over the past several years in strictest secrecy and kept tightly under wraps until now (see here and here), “confirms our fears,” said Sessions, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest.

“The text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership runs 5,554 pages,” declared Sessions, in a statement issued Thursday, soon after the release of the text. “This is, by definition, anti-democratic,” he charged. “No individual American has the resources to ensure his or her economic and political interests are safeguarded within this vast global regulatory structure.”

According to Sessions: “The predictable and surely desired result of the TPP is to put greater distance between the governed and those who govern. It puts those who make the rules out of reach of those who live under them, empowering unelected regulators who cannot be recalled or voted out of office. In turn, it diminishes the power of the people’s bulwark: their constitutionally-formed Congress.”

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